The Silent Ones - Chapter 1 - The Rusty Nail

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But if you step on a rusty nail you're probably going to scream anyway.

That was the random thought running through Olive's mind as she climbed. Glancing back over her shoulder, the cityscape seemed more vast than it had before. It stretched as far as she could see...millions of ant-sized lights spread between the deep red lava rifts - the life blood of the city - those veins that kept it all going. At night it looked almost like a dissected organism. Eerie, but impressively beautiful.

She shrugged, turned, and kept climbing. What good was it all anyway? In 200 years it would all be gone. Even sooner. True, something newer and "better" would be in its place, but this city - these buildings and all the people in them - they would all be gone. And no one coming after would know they had existed.

That was what made her want to scream. That thought was the rusty nail that had embedded in her mind since she was only 8 years old when she had been brought to her swearing ceremony and something in her heart refused to swear even as her lips went through the motions of it.

"Be careful Olive. Do you want them to send you back to Earth with the other dissenters?" That's what her mother always said any time Olive questioned The Oath aloud. Which, for the record, was a whole lot less times than she questioned it in her mind.

This mountain was her screaming place. She had had a swearing ceremony of her own here. A pact with this mountain on the day she arrived back on earth alone. And each night she kept her oath by making this trek.

"And I'll keep it until the day I die," she muttered vehemently under her breath.

A trail of fire streaked its way through the night sky. Some promising young scientist was leaving Earth...or some rebellious dissenter was being brought back. The sky was always being lit up by their back and forth trips. Children on Earth had started the tradition of watching the rockets leaving and making a wish...that someday they too would journey far and change the universe.

"Shooting stars my ass." Olive stopped to catch her breath. She could hear her mother's voice chiding her, "Attitude check, Olive...life is what you make it."

A rustle in the trees startled her from her memories. Earth people told terrible stories of the ApeMan who roamed the forests at night. Mostly just ghost stories to scare the kids but every once in a while a farm on the outskirts reported a "sighting" or the strange disappearance of livestock. Just enough proof to give you the chills but not enough to strip away the mystery.

Up ahead, Olive could see a familiar landmark. A dark space on the side of the mountain. Her cave. She jogged the rest of the way to it...just in case all the ApeMan stories were true. Once she slipped inside and turned on the lava lights she felt better...and a bit silly.

This place was where she felt the most at home. Back home - her real home - most of the planet's inhabitants lived in subterranean caves. It had been easier to break through to the lava in those places...and the natural shelter from the rare radiation storm was admittedly a big perk.

For a few minutes she just sat in the comfortable feelings of familiarity. Then she stood up resolutely, and walked to her toolbox. She pulled out her father's chisel...one of the few items she had snuck into her bag from home. A pang of guilt hit her every time she held it. The guilt of taking it without asking, sure, but deeper than that was the guilt of knowing how grieved her parents were when she was asked to leave the community. Somehow she knew her father was glad she had something of his here to remember him by...but whether or not he would ever forgive her for betraying The Oath...

She could still see him hammering away at rock samples, labeling each one almost lovingly, then taking them into his lab for analysis. He could spend hours in there hovered over a microscope. His back permanently bent as a sign of his dedication to the mysteries of his field. That unwavering dedication had always confounded her. How could he commit his life to discoveries that would never be credited to him?

Chink! The sound of the chisel against the cave wall echoed proudly. Echoes - they celebrated every sound. In Olive's mind they were like messengers that carried the past into the future. Echoes were the original dissenters then.

She was in the zone...chipping away for a solid hour. She had long since formed the obligatory blisters which had then burst and given way to calluses. Olive took a moment to step back and observe her work.

"Odd hobby you've got going here."

She jumped. ApeMan images were the first thing that jumped into her ridiculous brain. She turned to see a young man with medium-shaggy hair, eclectic, dark clothes and sharp, mocking eyes lurking in the shadows at the mouth of her cave. This wasn't good. She'd already been sent to Earth for breaking The Oath...whatever level of discipline was next was not gonna be good. She stood there like a silent idiot, chisel in hand.

"You do realize you're no artist. An ApeMan could draw better than this," he chided as he strolled casually into the cave and scanned the walls. "I'll give you this - you're dedicated. How many hours have you put into these chicken scratches?" He traced one of her recent drawings with a lazy finger.

"Don't worry, I'm not gonna tell anyone about your little cave diary here. What's your name? Or are you taking the whole Oath of Silence so literally that you're afraid to even speak?"

Olive flushed. "Who's asking?"

"So she speaks after all. I'd say names aren't important, but that's not really my jam. In fact, the opposite is my jam. Names are the shit. Mine's Branch. What's yours?"

"Olive," she replied, scanning the newcomer incredulously.

"Oh geez. Olive...Branch. We're never gonna hear the end of that! What's with our parents and all the naturey crap, anyway?"

"Don't worry, it's not like we are going to be friends or something," she shot back.

Olive Branch...oh brother. What was with all the naturey crap? Sheesh. Did even their names have to sound moldy like something the earth would swallow back up the second they died?

"Oh I think we're going to be friends. Seems to me that our goals might just be aligned." He slouched back against a wall and ran a hand through his wild hair. "You want to tell your story...you want to leave your mark. Literally. What if I could offer you a more global method of doing that? Something with a bit more pizzazz than just scratching your daily life's journal onto cave walls. Come on, we both know you can do better."

Olive was intrigued. But she did her best to hide it. He was too confident for her taste. Too sure that he could read her mind.

"What exactly do you have in mind?" She tried to look disinterested. She was pretty sure she failed at that because he smiled.

"Come on now. I'm not going to put all my cards on the table just yet. What do you take me for?" He was infuriating but in the way she secretly admired. Olive was listening.

"Here's the deal. We've been watching you. You seem like one of our kind of people. So I talked with the others and we'll fill you in if you pass the test. I'm just here to see if you want to meet 'em. No committment...no strings attached. Meet the group, take the test, and go from there."

If Olive had known where her new acquaintance would lead her...the path they were heading down...the results of the actions they would take...she might have made a different choice. But for all her generation's rabid dedication to progress, they still hadn't found a way to exist outside of time. A person's life still had to be lived as a process. And the woman she was in that moment had a rusty nail in her mind that made her want to scream. Too bad she forgot about tetanus.

"Cool. Where do we meet up?"